Dean and Jeanette Jackson were returning from a night out celebrating their son’s Ricky’s birthday party when they saw a mysterious figure darting across the A41 just north of Hendon.

Mr Jackson, forty, an office supplies salesman from Mill Hill, said: “I saw a man on the other side of the carriageway, a tall geezer wearing this big black cape and I reckoned he was going to a fancy dress do or something. I couldn’t see a car, but then he ran across two lanes, vaulted up the bank and vanished from sight – all in just a couple of seconds. He had no face as such, he was wearing a sort of mask that lit up like a toy robot. We were well baffled and voiced our startlement straight away. He was dead quick, and could jump like a Grand National champion.”

Mrs. Jackson, a beautician – thirty-seven – added: “Dean and I have slept with the light on for the past six nights. It is far and away the strangest thing to have happened to us since we moved to Mill Hill from Worcester Park. Every year something special happens on Ricky’s birthday. Last year it was the Pope, this year it’s Spring Heeled Jack.”

* Not real news item. However, Spring Heeled Jack was an urban myth of the Victorian era. A mysterious dark figure reported to be responsible for a string of attacks in the 1800s and known for his ability to leap great heights, was first sighted in Wandsworth in 1837 and given the SHJ sobriquet by the penny dreadfuls of his (or its) day. For further reading, see The Legend of Spring Heeled Jack.

A Sunday in May, on the towpath by the River Lea, just south of Lea Bridge Road:

Ding! … Ding! … Ding! … Ding! Ding! Ding!

The cyclist (mid-20s, jutting beard, sickly smile, deeply hittable face) steered his vintage eBay treasure inches between myself and my young son. Fifteen minutes into what was supposed to be a leisurely Sunday outing on the first really sunny weekend of the year and I was reduced to hissing violent epithets at various types of cyclist. Hipster cyclists, as above; Spandexed cyclists, often in entire family groups; unnervingly swift and purposeful cyclists with business on their minds; kids on mountain bikes; even a brace of fancy-dress cyclists, decked out in Edwardian gear – bowlers, waistcoats, plus-fours, spats – on authentically recalcitrant machines. Whatever their costume, they were all united by their fondness for those little silver bells, their peremptory tinkle an indication of assumed moral right. As a pedestrian on the towpath, on the Lea or a London canal, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that cyclists see you as merely a car-driver deprived of your vehicle. (Suggested collective noun: an entitlement of cyclists.)

Not that long ago, this stretch of the Lea was a backwater; and the landscape still offers those with a taste for brownfield-rural the opportunity to participate in an Ian Sinclair-ish topographical narrative in a lush setting. There are overgrown meadows, deserted municipal sports facilities, mysterious structures to negotiate, structures often covered in an abundance of picturesque graffiti (whilst photographing the uncharacteristically polite cyclists walking their bikes under the East Cross Route, I noticed a young man posing his girlfriend for snaps on the other side of the decorated pillars). Of course, this riverside has been ravaged in recent years by the Alphaville of the Olympic Park, and the new residential developments that line the western bank south of Lea Bridge are testament to the burgeoning popularity of East London-lite: Hipster London, Foxtons London, Fatuous London.

Yet somehow, the houseboats remain aloof from it all; and the beauty of the Lea leads to daydreams of buying one, the idyll of having your very own piece of river within (distant) earshot of the churning city. A friend of mine has his own boat, a proper sea-going job, which he occasionally sails from Lowestoft to Limehouse Basin, where he moors it as his London base. This always struck me as simultaneously butch and civilised, an impression only slightly marred by a desperate call I once received from him en route, somewhere near Sheerness, asking if I’d heard the Shipping Forecast because his radio was broken. Several of the vessels moored on the Lea have all the appurtenances of the riverside ‘luxury apartments’ touted by Foxtons and their ilk, and it is not too exotic to imagine some of them actually sailing somewhere. A London houseboat might be the nearest thing to bucolic living anywhere within the M25; but a cursory inspection of some of the more ramshackle examples give one pause. More than a couple appear to be actually sinking, invoking thoughts of Viv Stanshall’s houseboat foundering on the Thames near Chertsey. A houseboat is not a very safe place to store a life’s work, and much of Viv’s life sank with The Searchlight. Even if your boat is watertight, there are other dangers: Malcolm Hardee drowned in Greenland Dock during a drunken attempt to access his houseboat after a night out. (Eddie Mirzoeff has just pointed out to me that Penelope Fitzgerald’s Chelsea Reach-moored houseboat sank not once but twice in the early 1960s, inspiring her Booker Prize-winning novel Offshore.)

Still the temptations persist … walking south, we encountered a riverine barbecue-cum-jam session, two barges lassooed together, a party of expert folk musicians playing together in an atmosphere of easy familiarity and home-brewed ale. I’m generally allergic to the claims of folk music but even I was charmed and wondered whether the water offered a better way of life for those in the know … but only a few yards further south, jungle was being played at industrial-noise level from a flat in a new block, obliterating the reels from upstream and putting paid to idyllic wonderings. Any remaining notions of hippie-ish promise were soon trashed as we reached the East Cross Route, where the aggressive post-Olympic new builds proved demoralising enough for us to turn back. Perhaps there is no such thing as a backwater in London any more; a sage with a tin of spray paint helped articulate this thought by stating the obvious on a bridge …

Back at Lea Bridge, the Prince of Wales was doing brisk business as football played on the TV. A massive new development is under construction on the north of the Lea Bridge Road. For real peace, you have to go further upstream, way beyond Springfield Park and up into Tottenham Marshes; if you moored there, maybe you would have a shot at a life of tranquility. If you saw a naked cyclist, it would be someone who did it every day. And that would be fine. Just an unpretentious houseboat, not too big, easy to manage through the locks, kitted out with obsolete technology – VHS tapes, audio cassettes – and overflowing with old paperbacks you could read by paraffin lamp. You know where to find me …

* The above photo and the following text were found on the top deck of a 243 bus travelling through Dalston. The top of the A4 sheet was torn and the artist’s name was missing.

I make images because I am driven to commit a feeling to something visual. My work is endowed with a narrative quality. Through a personally charged perception I explore a range of issues relating to the formlessness of both individual and social reality. This evolves from a close reading of discourse and neuroses surrounding the condition of human existence. I translate the incoherence of lived experience into elements accomplished by a distortion of what is known. The real thus becomes charged with imagined specificity. By describing the world as I imagine, perceive and exist within it, this element of personal mirroring may also act as a reflective process for the viewer.

If, like me, you cycle through King’s Cross most days, the description of Staggs’s Gardens in ‘Dombey and Son’ will seem familiar: ‘…bridges that lead nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations…’

When you remember that a Stag was a railway speculator, that Staggs’s Gardens is supposed to be in Camden, the whole scene is a remarkable prefiguring of the bringing of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link into St Pancras and the associated works, such as the transformation of the streets east of King’s Cross into ‘Regent Quarter’ (which is somehow ten times more irritating as a name than ‘Regent’s Quarter’ would have been) and the development of the old goods yards north of King’s Cross.

The developers contend that ‘no one can be nostalgic for the old King’s Cross.’ Well, that depends what you mean by ‘old’. There was so much shilly-shallying over whether King’s Cross or St Pancras should receive the CTRL that the area has been blighted for at least twenty years. (And many locals, incidentally, still wonder why Eurostar is coming into North London at all, given that South London is closer to France, and that the Waterloo terminus seems to be doing perfectly well). Immediately before the blight, the area was, according to Albert Beale of Houseman’s book shop on Caledonian Road, ‘pleasantly seedy’, as opposed to the heart of darkness, which it became.

Pre-blight, there were dark pubs where the beer mat tended to stick to the bottom of the glass, but King’s Cross was full of interesting transients, and with a sooty, crepuscular, train-haunted feel. When coming down from York as a teenager, I would drink in two wonderful old pubs in the south end of York way. The first was the Duke of York. It’s now called ‘Offshore’. Nipping in there the other day, I asked the Antipodean barmaid if she knew what the pub had been called before. A rather cruel experiment, I admit. ‘As far as I know it’s always been called Offshore,’ she said. I wonder if she also thinks it’s always been painted sky blue, and carried the slogan ‘Backpacking the world’ as it does today. This would certainly have made it stand out in 1860.

The second pub was The Railway Tavern, which had a black and white tv as late as about 1995, and was full of railway men, with those distinctive box-like shoulder bags. It is now hidden behind a hoarding, waiting to re-emerge, hung, drawn and Regent Quartered. I suppose it’ll be a Juice Bar.

In Staggs’s Gardens, the nice old Ham and Beef Shop suddenly becomes the Railway Eating House, and the word ‘Railway’ is imposed on everything, even buildings that have as yet only a façade. My fear for King’s Cross tends in the opposite direction. I worry it will lose its railway character. I could be wrong. Most of the old buildings on the Railway Lands are to be preserved. And many of the locations used in the Ladykillers – which was made in 1955 when getting on for forty trains a day were still coming into the goods yard – still survive.

The house of the old lady, Mrs Wilberforce, tended to flit around a bit. Some of the exteriors were done in Goldington Crescent, which is just as elegant as ever. For her rear garden (from where the bodies of the crooks were dumped onto coal trains) a patch of grass on top of Copenhagen Tunnel was used, and if you go along to the end of Vale Royal, off York Way, you can see the very spot. A man keeps horses there. The top of the tunnel is all black, cracked Gothic battlements, and the trains still thunder underneath towards the mass of X’s that form the points leading into King’s Cross.

I do hope this prospect is preserved. If not…well, The Ladykillers is just out on DVD.

Customs officers at Gatwick Airport got more than they bargained for when they searched the luggage of a passenger arriving from Nigeria: inside his suitcase they found more than ninety kilograms of giant caterpillars swarming inside a bubble wrap cocoon.

The man told the customs officials that they were for his personal consumption during his stay in Britain. However, the caterpillars are a popular delicacy across Africa and, as such, represent a valuable trading commodity. Customs official Bridget Fumes commented: ‘We get a lot of people trying to smuggle animals into the country – last month we had someone wearing a lizard as a hat and a man with a pair of monkeys down his trousers, but to my knowledge this is the first time we have had giant caterpillars.’

Stavros Wilt, an insect expert at the Natural History Museum, commented: ‘These are likely to be mopane worms, the larvae of emperor moths, which are commonly eaten in Africa. A favoured method of consumption is to pinch the caterpillar at the tail to rupture its innards, followed by a sharp flick to liberate the guts via the burst carapace. The resulting matter may be fried until crisp with onion, tomatoes and chillis. Alternatively, they may be dried and eaten raw as a crunchy snack.’

‘This was an unusual seizure but the vigilance of our officers prevented this consignment of rogue insects from entering the UK, and possibly posing a risk to the health and wellbeing of the populace,’ proclaimed Ms Fumes. ‘I would warn travellers not to attempt to bring any products of animal origin into the UK without a permit, as they may not have been inspected to appropriate standards and may contain diseases. These caterpillars are not something I expect to see in the Gatwick staff canteen any time soon!’

An increasing number of British outlets offer mopane worms for ‘own consumption only’. The online retailer Planet Nosh sells 40g bags for £16.99, saying that the insects are a tasty and nutritious alternative to traditional meat products, and describes them as ‘the ultimate barbecue novelty’. Experts estimate that the caterpillars seized at Gatwick had a street value of £40,000.

The caterpillars are being cared for at an animal rescue shelter in Kent.

* NB: A mostly, if not entirely, genuine news item: a mash-up of reports from International Business Times, The Independent, lepidoptera.pro, etc. The second in an occasional series. See also: The Supermarket Spider (http://wp.me/p1twhU-33W)